Cycle Of Poverty, Despair Born Again In Delivery Room

October 07, 1985|By Bonita Brodt and Jerry Thornton. Mark Zambrano, William Recktenwald and Don Terry contributed to this story.

Iris Moore is chewing bubble gum and singing along with a song on the radio as she sits beside a tiny incubator in the intensive care nursery at Mt. Sinai Hospital, where sick babies are hooked up to tubes and wires and machines that help them breathe.

One of the infants belongs to her.

At 17, Iris is the oldest of five children in her family. Her mother is on welfare and her father unemployed. Dr. Ann West, a second-year resident at Mt. Sinai, remembers the sinking feeling that came over her when she delivered Iris` baby at about 11 p.m. July 21.

``I felt sad,`` West recalls. ``You don`t know how babies like this will do.``

The baby, named Tina, was born too soon, 15 weeks premature. She weighed only 710 grams, slightly more than a pound and a half. Premature deliveries are often the result of adolescent pregnancies and are all too common at Mt. Sinai, a teaching hospital in the impoverished West Side neighborhood of North Lawndale, where on any given day, the medical world confronts the consequences of lives mired in the black underclass.

From the moment Tina Moore was born, her future was in jeopardy.

She depended on a whoosh of oxygen from a tube just so she could take her first breath. Medical complications resulting from her prematurity may leave her with respiratory difficulties, a susceptibility to sudden infant death syndrome and learning disabilities that might not be revealed until she is ready for school.

But she is vulnerable to much more.

Unless someone or something intervenes during the little girl`s life, there is good reason to believe that Tina Moore will be condemned to repeat the same vicious cycle that took hold of her mother, her grandmother and her great-grandmother, by having a baby during--or perhaps even before--her teens. The striking number of teenage girls having babies is a priority health concern in Chicago and across the nation, for the children born to these mothers are often premature and growth retarded and can suffer a number of devastating complications at or shortly after birth that can compromise the quality of their life.

But the impact of adolescents having babies has consequences far beyond the medical ones in communities of the black underclass. Once the cycle takes hold and a young girl has a child, her ability to improve her economic or social condition and pull herself out into a more productive segment of society is limited. Often, she drops out of school, has no job skills and falls into the welfare trap for support.

In monetary terms, Tina Moore has already been an expensive baby. The price of the heroic medical efforts employed to salvage her life had surpassed $120,000 by the time she was released from the hospital Sunday.

As she and thousands of youngsters like her grow up in environments that have little to offer in the way of nurturing, educating and inspiring, there can only be additional costs.

Tina Moore will live in North Lawndale, a neighborhood that has been culturally, spiritually and physically devastated by years of segregation, lost jobs and crumbling housing structures. As a community, North Lawndale represents the harsh challenge cities face in trying to solve the problems of what seems to have become a permanent underclass consisting largely of poor blacks.

Home for this baby will be on the drafty first floor of a building that her family inherited from a relative. Its value is questionable. There is no gas for heat or cooking; the service was cut off because of an outstanding $2,000 bill. A makeshift propane tank heats one room.

Iris, the child`s mother, dropped out of Collins High School after attending only one day of her junior year. She has never had a job. Like her mother and her grandmother, she has signed up with the Illinois Department of Public Aid for benefits under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. She expects her first check this month.

At home one morning last week, Iris was watching a television rerun when asked whether she had any plans to go back to school, perhaps by finding a baby-sitter.

``I don`t have anything to wear,`` she answered while combing her hair.

``I`m not going to go up there looking like a bum. No way.``

Figures from the Illinois Department of Public Health show that of the 1,492 births in North Lawndale in 1984, 33 percent were to women age 19 or younger. Fifteen percent were to girls 17 and below. One was to a girl who was 12.

Citywide, only 19 percent of the total 53,906 births were to women 19 or younger.

Dr. Norbert Gleischer, chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Mt. Sinai, said about half of the babies born to teenagers there are premature, are small for their gestational age or have physical difficulties complicated by alcohol or drug use by the mother.

In 1983, 96 percent of the babies born to teenage girls in North Lawndale were illegitimate. Figures for 1984 are not yet available.